Welcome post-doctoral associate Kristin Franseen
The Don Wright Faculty of Music is pleased to welcome postdoctoral associate in musicology Kristin Franseen, who started at Western in May 2024.
“I came across the posting for the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program while I was finishing up my previous postdoc position and knew of Western's strengths in both musicology and media studies. I was especially drawn to professor Goehring's work on historical constructions of genius and the amount of work going on in FIMS around knowledge communities and misinformation/disinformation studies,” notes Franseen on her decision to come to Western.
Her research and teaching focus on questions of identity, canon formation, and critical biography studies in writings on 18th- and 19th-century Western art music, with particular emphases on queer and feminist histories, the (un)reliability of gossip and anecdote as historical sources, and the widespread appeal of fiction on musical subjects. Her book Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023; see the companion website here) considers the strategies used by late 19th- and early 20th-century musicologists, critics, and others to discuss sexuality and gender several decades before the advent of queer and feminist musicological methods. This project received additional financial support from the Ora Frishberg Saloman Fund of the American Musicological Society and an AMS 75 PAYS subvention. She also has secondary research interests in the depiction of female philosophers in 18th-century comic opera, celebrity endorsements in early metronome advertising, and women in the history of music theory.
Franseen’s current project, “The Intriguing Afterlives of Antonio Salieri: Gossip, Fiction, and the Post-Truth in Musical Biography,” explores the interactions between fact, fiction, and semi-fictions in Antonio Salieri’s popular reception from his widely reported (and misreported) hospitalization in 1823 through the upcoming 200th anniversary of his death in 2025.
Before coming to Western, she previously was a postdoctoral fellow in history at Concordia University (where her research was supported by postdoctoral and knowledge mobilization grants from the Fonds de recherche du Québec) and taught courses in music history and research methods at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa.
“Since moving to London at the end of May,” says Franseen, “I've had the opportunity to conduct some archival research at the Stratford Festival Archives on Peter Shaffer's revised version of Amadeus from the mid-1990s, present preliminary research on British press coverage of Salieri's later life at a hybrid conference on psychiatry and the arts in 19th-century Britain, and devote some time to plan future writing projects and outline a proposal for what will hopefully become my second book.”
